


Dreamcatcher

by MeinongsJungleBook



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: ...any other tags would spoil it, Cults, Eldritch Abominations, Mind Rape, Other, Self-Esteem Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-21
Updated: 2019-06-21
Packaged: 2020-05-13 16:11:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19254643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MeinongsJungleBook/pseuds/MeinongsJungleBook
Summary: Starscream confronts his demons, in a manner of speaking.





	Dreamcatcher

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Starbee Week prompt "Trope Generator". I'll list which generated tropes I used to construct this fic at the end, because otherwise it will spoil where this goes. 
> 
> Thanks to [Aurobot](https://auro-bot.tumblr.com/) for coming up with the title.

No matter what he did, regardless of what approach he tried, he just inevitably fragged everything up, time after time. Starscream sat slumped on this throne as he wallowed in this miserable thought that clearly had a firm basis in truth, as made clear by the cacophony of the emergency evacuation sirens blaring outside, which were just auditable from the seclusion of his throne room. The evacuation was ultimately a token gesture; it wasn’t going to save anyone, not when the hostile forces weren’t invading from any point in space, but were instead crossing the very fabric of reality itself to ruin everything for him. And Starscream had been the one stupid enough to invite them in. Oh sure, being declared the Chosen One by an insane hulk that the masses regarded as holy had seemed like the most amazing luck – an opportunity that he’d be an idiot not to take advantage of. Then letting the people steadily build a cult around him had just seemed like a logical extension of allowing them to see him as their messiah – after all if it was _his_ cult then surely _he_ controlled it, so it wouldn’t be able to do anything too untoward without his approval, right? Well, he certainly never explicitly approved of them feeding power to trans-dimensional eldritch abominations until they were strong enough to breach the barriers between universes, and yet here they were.

Starscream took his crown from his head and flung it across the room with a roar of self-directed rage before he buried his head in his hands. How did it come to this? He was the Chosen One, he was supposed to lead Cybertron towards greatness, not feed it to the eldritch void. Not that he had _believed_ the mad Titan’s mystic ramblings, but he had thought that its broken mind had coincidentally put together a string of words that so happened to mirror the shape of the magnificent destiny he had always felt was his. And in truth...as more and more of his citizens had become his devotees, and his cult had become increasingly swollen with clerics and priestesses dedicated to spreading the holy word of his divinity, more and more of what they said seemed to make a strange sort of sense, until, on some level, even Starscream himself sort of believed it. Starscream, the great manipulator, swindled by the very people he was trying to use, with the very thing he was trying to play them with.

“This is all my fault,” Starscream whispered into his hands.

“Starscream...you’ve done many things I’ve disagreed with over the years, and I never approved of the cult, but neither of us could have guessed **this** was coming. I’m the perfect invisible, unstoppable spy and even I didn’t realise what they were up to. You don’t need to blame yourself...but we do need to do _something_ ,” the spectre of Bumblebee by his side told him, in a tone that managed to be both gentle and firm.

Starscream looked at Bumblebee, and considered how he had every reason to be wildly suspicious of him. After all, he was definitely some kind of undead; Starscream liked to pretend that he still thought that he was a figment of his imagination, but by now it was clear that Bumblebee knew far too many inexplicable things to possibly be an extension of him. Given that Starscream now knew that everything that had happened to him over the last few years was part of a long game to welcome eldritch monstrosities into their universe, it made the most sense that the ethereal Bumblebee was a part of that scheme. And yet, Starscream couldn’t bring himself to distrust Bumblebee, who had been there through everything, the one person who had never given up on him when things were at their most hopeless. Bumblebee was the one thing left in this universe that he could trust.

“I’m going to fix this,” Starscream decided. “Somehow.”

“There has to be a way,” Bee affirmed.

If Bumblebee was the one person in the universe who Starscream could trust, Airachnid was the bot that Starscream could most trust to be untrustworthy. And yet, despite everything, despite the fact that she had played a key role in bringing about the current catastrophe, she still managed to remain useful to him (and by extension, managed to remain alive). So that was why she was the one Starscream called upon. After the many millennia he spent surrounded by the twisted scientists and unhinged killers employed by the Decepticons, Starscream had become hard to rattle, so when he took Airachnid under his wing her murderous callousness and morbid curiosity hadn’t much bothered him. As time had gone on however, she had evolved into an increasingly unsettling creature, until even Starscream found her unnerving, but then it was only fitting that the high priestess of a cult that had ultimately proved to serve eldritch abominations was extremely creepy.

She stalked into his throne room, the holy regalia that had been added to her frame making her look even more disturbing and predatory than she had originally. She bowed before him in a manner that was simultaneously ingratiating and mocking, “How can I be of service Chosen One?”

“How do I stop this Airachnid?” Starscream asked simply; he was past playing games with her. Even though Airachnid had been one of the main conspirators responsible for bringing about this apocalypse, Starscream still expected an honest answer from her. He understood that to her this was ultimately all an experiment in her twisted quest for absolute knowledge, and observing how Starscream faired as he made an earnest attempt to stop what was happening would just be another interesting data gathering exercise to her.

“Surely you must realise that you are the answer my lord,” she replied, smiling as her head remained bowed.

“I will kill you if you give me riddles instead of answers Airachnid,” Starscream said in a cold rage, as he considered the most painful ways he could do just that.

Airachnid didn’t seem phased by this, but she gave him his answers all the same, “The people of this realm are gateways for the Others, but you are the key. It’s only once they pass through you that they’ll truly be free to fully come into existence. For this reason, you can also be the choke point where their campaign is ended.”

Starscream took an uncomfortable moment to consider this before he said, “Are you saying I’ll have to recharge?” Recharge was the way they got in – once bots went to sleep they crept into their dreams and took their minds, followed by their bodies. Starscream had done his best to have those that were already infected quarantined and he had ordered the rest evacuated because...because deep down he already knew what Airachnid was saying was true. Starscream had become accustomed to operating on far less recharge than any medic would recommend, and he was used to being constantly tired. Now, on the fringes of his exhaustion he could feel it – something so intrinsically alien and unknowable, that had only one comprehensible aspect: its desire to get in. Those that had already been infected were left half transformed and screaming in a mix of their horror and their parasitic invader’s eldritch howl, but somehow Starscream knew that once whatever was trying to pass through him had its way there would be no half measures, everything would be over. He knew there was no point in sending his people away – as soon as they inevitably slipped into recharge they would be gone, but after he had failed them so utterly, he didn’t want what little would be left of him after his Other took him over to also be the thing that ultimately destroyed them.

“This is a battle you’ll have to fight in the plane of dreams, where our reality overlaps with theirs,” Airachnid confirmed.

Starscream gave a curt nod of understanding; it was time to clean up his mess, “Put me under,” he said.

***

Whereas Airachnid had once sent Starscream into surreal dreamscapes from a sterile, minimalist lab, this time she did so in the bowels of the temple, surrounded by the eerie, mystical paraphernalia of the cult. Looking at the unsettling idols and symbols that circled him and cast monstrous shadows in the low lighting, Starscream wondered how he couldn’t have realised that he was at the centre of an eldritch apocalypse cult earlier.

“You can do this,” Bumblebee’s words of encouragement were the last thing Starscream heard before he slipped into dreams.

In the eerie dreamscape where his traits, desires and neurosis manifested themselves symbolically as a decaying city, that sense of the Other became overwhelming; the indescribable feeling of its ubiquitous presence mingled with Starscream’s sense of dread, “Alright, you want me,” Starscream hissed as he manifested a pair of swords, “so come and get me.”

He didn’t have to ask twice; from every direction he felt himself assaulted at the most fundamental level – it was inside his mind and his spark, sifting through everything that made him who he was with impunity, snaking its tendrils into the very core of his being. Starscream shrieked at the violation, wanting to fight back, but having no idea how; this was not the physical battle he was accustomed to, nor was it a clash of intellects or the wits he had honed. This was an assault on a part of himself that was simultaneously the part that he understood the least and the part that was most fundamentally _him_. This stripped him down more thoroughly than Vigilem had; it consumed more completely than the D-Void ever could.

He could feel his sense of self slipping away as the Other took it to grant itself the existence and form that it so desperately craved, its greed magnified tenfold as it made Starscream’s own legendary rapacity a part of itself. Starscream summoned every drop of his tremendous willpower in order to find some way to fight against the Other’s infection, but it just took that from him too, growing all the more powerful for doing so. As it took everything that made him who he was, it transformed from a nebulous sense of omnipresent alienness into an eldritch, monstrous reflection of Starscream himself, staring at him with a face that was utterly nightmarish and indescribable, and yet still somehow recognisable as his own. Starscream started to dissipate, as he was transformed from an individual with shape and substance to a barely-there essence...

“Starscream! **_Starscream_** ** _!_** ” Starscream felt himself pulled back into being, anchored to existence by the voice of the one person who had never abandoned him, the one bot he could always rely on to be by his side through highs and the lows. Starscream’s eyes snapped open and he recoalesced into an individual with form and identity, and saw Bumblebee with him in the dreamscape, staring at him with grave concern. But that was not all that he saw; despite Starscream’s sense of self returning to him, it hadn’t been taken back from the Other, which now towered over both him and Bee with a form that was somehow both deeply familiar and unknowably alien, a contradiction that Starscream found nauseating to gaze upon.

Starscream looked upon his monstrous reflection and saw it staring back at him with all his self-loathing, a manifestation of his most recent colossal failure in a life made up of innumerable failures. The entity’s form shifted constantly in sickening ways, making it practically impossible to determine what its vulnerable areas might be, but Starscream was willing to take a stab at it. He hurled one of his swords towards the monster and it absorbed the weapon with a howl, its form flaring and only seeming to grow larger and more threatening and nightmarish.

Undeterred, Starscream prepared to hurl his other sword when Bumblebee held up his hand, “Wait!” he cried, prompting Starscream to pause, before he turned to the monster. “Hey, over here!” he yelled, waving his arms, and the entity’s focus seemed to shift from Starscream to scrutinise Bee. “Hi,” Bee said simply before he just stared at the eldritch entity for a moment with an expression of panic that made it clear he was making everything up as he went along, “um...that’s a good look for you.” Starscream stared at Bee in dumbfounded disbelief, but the entity just scrutinised Bee harder, while Bee continued to ramble, “I bet it's exhilarating being so close to finally achieving you goal, I know you’ve been working towards it for a long time, and you have every reason to be proud for coming so far. It’s truly impressive, everything you’ve pulled off, you’re a really incredible being,” although the monster’s form was an indescribable, non-Euclidian nightmare that didn’t move in any way that made sense, in response to Bee’s words Starscream could swear it had started to... _preen?_  

Bumblebee continued on, “I bet it was lonely on the other side. Maybe you didn’t realise it at the time, but now that you can think back on it with your new perspective I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s how it feels. I know there were others who were like you over there, but you couldn’t really relate to them, could you? You never had friends. I could be your friend if you like,” Bee said with a gentle smile.

The entity made some noise that was completely alien, yet somehow also sounded like a derisive snort, and although Starscream couldn’t describe the way it moved in any language, he nonetheless got the distinct sense that it was crossing its arms and sticking its nose up in the air haughtily.

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Bee sighed wearily, “you don’t need anyone. But have you considered that your existence will be a lot easier, and much more enjoyable, if you just let people help you and be your friend? I know it isn’t easy to trust people, but I’ll tell you what: since you like to dig around inside people and extract their essence, I’ll let you reach into my being and see whether I’m someone you can trust.”

“Bee, no!” Starscream cried, but then the entity’s greedy tendrils speared the minibot from every direction as it started to infiltrate the core of Bee’s being. Astoundingly, Bee didn’t scream, but he screwed up his face and gritted his teeth as it delved deeper and deeper within him. Starscream raised his sword, ready to hack the tendrils away, when suddenly a hurricane seemed to sweep through the dreamscape. A howl echoed around him and he felt himself being buffeted by chaotic forces, and it seemed as though he was being swept towards something. He could barely perceive what was going on, but he got the sense that wherever he was going, Bee and the Other were coming with him. As they were all sucked into the vortex, it started to dawn on Starscream that he was waking up, and that the Other was leaving the dreamscape with him, just as it had wanted. Desperately he swung his sword in the hopes that he would make contact with the Other and destroy it before they breached the surface of consciousness, but it was hopeless; Starscream was caught in the middle of chaos and there was no way he could effectively do anything.

He awoke with a start on the slab, surrounded by the same creepy idols, and bolted upright, ready to face the monster made manifest in the real world. And there it was, but it wasn’t like it had been in the dreamscape: it was still monstrous, but not in the overwhelmingly unknowable way it had been before, instead it had a form that made physical sense, and could best be described as serpentine, or maybe draconic. It was still supremely strange to gaze upon, with weird features haphazardly sticking out from each foot of its snaking form. What was notable however was that many of these features resembled Starscream, and not just his current frame, but every frame he’d had throughout his life. It was like something had smashed all of Starscream’s bodies into scrap metal and then used them to assemble a very questionable sculpture. While the creature mostly resembled Starscream, he also spotted elements that resembled Bumblebee scattered here and there amongst pieces of himself. There were also still things about it that were distinctly eldritch, and Starscream quickly moved on from these parts, because gazing on them filled him with a sense of wrongness. The one thing about this creature that wasn’t at all alien however was its behaviour: it was undeniably being affectionate, as evidenced by the way it was sweetly nuzzling the form of Bumblebee who stood by its head.  

Bumblebee petted it, completely unfazed by what it was, and simply marvelling at the fact he was able to touch it. Suddenly a look of shocked revelation lit up on his face, and he stamped his feet on the ground, his mouth hanging open as they made noise. Starscream’s optics widened, and both he and Bumblebee reached their hands towards each other.

The tips of their fingers met.

***

Starscream gave a contented sigh as he wrapped his arms tighter around Bumblebee and pulled him further into his lap to nuzzle at his helm while they sat languidly on their sizeable recharge slab. Things had been going very well lately; he ruled over one of the most prosperous empires in their arm of the galaxy, maintaining peace both within and without thanks to help of Bumblebee, his consort and beastmaster. After Bee had safely extracted the Other from Starscream, he had eventually managed to do so with the other infected bots, harmlessly separating the bots from the Others that were trying to use them as portals to their reality, and allowing the Others through in the process. With volunteers to act as the conduits, he even helped some more Others into their universe that hadn’t had the chance to start breaking through in the first place. With Bumblebee midwifing the process, he was able to help the Others forge themselves into shapes built out of the best parts of the bots they’d passed through to achieve solid existence (without having to steal those parts from their original owners in the process). When one’s first impression of existence was Bumblebee, it tended to leave one with a good-natured disposition. Bumblebee could be friends with anybody, which meant he could be friends with monsters that formed themselves out of the personality traits of anybody.  

So now they had an army of eldritch beasts loyal to Starscream’s empire at their disposal, _not that Bumblebee would actually allow them to be used for conquest_. He was the one who had the gift for handling them, so he had the final say on the matter. But they were very useful in many other ways; for one they could tunnel through space to create wormholes wherever Starscream wanted them set up, allowing a transportation network to be created so that goods, people and fleets could be instantly teleported wherever in the universe they were needed. They were easier to create, power and maintain than space bridges, which gave the empire the edge it needed to excel in just about every respect. Studying the nature of the Others had also given their scientists huge new insights into the how the universe and multiverse worked, which led to tremendous breakthroughs in science, technology, medicine and philosophy. Plus there was the fact that the other, potentially hostile civilizations didn’t actually realise that Bee would never allow his army of precious, incredibly powerful trans-dimensional beasts to be used for violence; that certainly helped. All of this had allowed Starscream to make things exceedingly better not just for himself, but for many, many other people too, both Cybertronian and alien alike.  

As Starscream and Bumblebee cuddled, their pet snuffled from its position on the floor, its lengthy body encircling their luxurious recharge slab. Bee was very fond of all of his beasts, but he had a special fondness for his first, and Starscream was pretty sure the only reason he didn’t let it sleep on their slab with them was because, as large as the slab was, it still wasn’t big enough. Because their pet was largely made out of parts of Starscream’s psyche, it was very fond of Bumblebee in return, and for the same reason Bee felt it best to keep it by his side so that he could keep an eye on it.  

Their pet raised its head onto the slab and nuzzled Starscream’s leg – it had inherited his attention seeking tendencies as well. While it certainly liked Bee best, since it also had a little bit of Bee in it, it was loving towards Starscream as well, and Starscream couldn’t help but love it back for the same reason. He reached down and indulged it with head scritches, and its loud purrs caused the fabric of reality to gently ripple. Starscream was fond of it because it had a bit of Bee in it, but also because it was made out of him; sure Starscream was a known narcissist, but in honesty he had also grappled with self-loathing for much of his life. But now, after all that he had been able to do and all the people he had been able to help now that he had Bee helping him, that self-loathing had started to fade. He felt his spark gently pulse with joy as he cuddled his consort and affectionately stroked his purring pet. With Bumblebee around, he liked himself a lot better.  

**Author's Note:**

> Ok, so basically I hit the [TVTropes Story Generator](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/storygen.php) a bunch of times to build up a big list of tropes, then I eyeballed that list for a while until some of those tropes started to come together to form a story in my mind, then whittled the list down so it was only made of the tropes in ended up using. 
> 
> The tropes I ultimately used to make the story are as follows:
> 
> -The Poorly Chosen One  
> -Path of Inspiration  
> -Eldritch Abominations  
> -The Atoner  
> -Alien Invasion  
> -Quarantine with Extreme Prejudice  
> -Nuns are Spooky  
> -Dream Land  
> -Mind Rape  
> -Damsel in Distress  
> -Pacifist  
> -Collector of the Strange  
> -Cuddle Bug


End file.
